Great Contemporaries

Lady Violet: “He had no doubts about his star. He felt that he had been preserved through many perils in order to fulfil its purpose.”

Violet Asquith, 1906: “I found myself sitting next to this young man who seemed to me quite different from any other young man I had ever met…”

“Politics for Churchill, if he is ever to fulfill his promise, must have everything to do with the salvation of mankind.” —Harold Begbie

Sinclair aging: “He did so much and worried so greatly on account of the boys who lost their lives…no wonder that he is now a war casualty.”

Hopkins to Churchill, 1942: “‘Where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God’…Even to the end.”

Winston Churchill was not a man to bear grudges, and firmly admired the Irish. Yet he was strangely oblivious to the widespread, albeit not universal, hostility still felt towards him in nationalist Ireland. In 1953 he faced a libel action in Ireland arising out of his memoirs. It was brought by Eric Dorman-Smith, an Irish-born general whom he had dismissed during the Desert War. He expressed doubt that “an Irish jury would necessarily be unfair or that they would be prejudiced against me.” His legal advisers knew better. They made sure the case was settled before it got to be heard before a jury in Dublin. When Churchill died in 1965, de Valera, now President of Ireland, lauded him as a great Englishman. He could not omit to add the rider that Churchill had been a “dangerous enemy” of the Irish people.

Pamela Harriman, said Jacques Chirac, was “elegance itself...a peerless diplomat.” That old Francophile, her father-in-law, would have smiled.

Still visible above swirls of pettiness, heroes remain: Brooke, the great general; above him, looming ever larger, the man who saved liberty.

Wingate “lives on in the long-range penetration groups, and all these intricate and daring air and military operations.” —WSC

Lawrence “was indeed a dweller upon the mountain tops…and where the view on clear days commands all the Kingdoms of the world and the glory of them.” —WSC

With his many achievements, Haldane stood as warning that the apex of politics, there was no such thing as friendship. Except perhaps with Churchill.

Throwback to vanished age, Sassoon served his country in war and peace, and entertained the glitterati at his palatial mansions. He died too young.